


The heart remembers

by Ruta



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Light Angst, Post-Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:23:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7686148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winterfell is not the Winterfell of his memories.<br/>Winterfell is not the same and this is undeniable; he is not the same man as well. Too many battles and too much blood had smeared her stones, too many deaths, too much destruction, too much pain, too much grief. Nothing remains unchanged over time and he is a demonstration of this. Even so, <em>Winterfell should have</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The heart remembers

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first tentative in this fandom and with this ship. I love them, but before I was a little intimidated to try.  
> I am Italian, English isn’t my native language, so forgive any errors. Even so, I really hope you enjoy it!

 

Winterfell is not the Winterfell of his memories. The one capable to fill him with acute regret, to burn his lungs more than the Wall’s cold ever could. The one that, during the first nights as a Night's Watch between walls still unknown and suspicious glances, gave him a sense of serenity and peace.

During guard duty, the memory of his family and home was the only solution to slow down the nervous breath, extinguish the nostalgic languor he felt inside, dampen the sense of loneliness that oppressed him.

Now that he has returned, Winterfell is different in a way that seems inconceivable, that breaks his heart.

Winterfell is no longer home and Jon cannot help but wonder about the quality of that change, if its roots are to be found in him, in the eyes with which he looks at home or rather in the avulsed and sometimes hostile environment surrounding him.

Winterfell is not the same and this is undeniable; he is not the same man as well. Too many battles and too much blood had smeared her stones, too many deaths, too much destruction, too much pain, too much grief. Nothing remains unchanged over time and he is a demonstration of this.

Even so, _Winterfell should have._

The thought is a grim one and contains the ashes of all that has been hope, the mirages of the days when he was little more than a boy, those guilty desires that now he keeps as a testimony of his covetousness, the dual nature of a broken man, half-son, half-brother, a bastard.

It is not due to the areas damaged by the fire lit by Theon Greyjoy or the furniture lost in the looting. The change is more subtle, is not to be found in the bare rooms, in the state of deterioration and neglect that rages similar to a disease.

  
The change is in the air, but he cannot identify the source. Only in that case he could eradicate it. Only then Winterfell could go back to being the Winterfell of his childhood.

 

* * *

 

It is an ordinary day, a day like the many others that have preceded it.

Jon is going through one of the courtyards when he notices that Ghost has been standing a few feet away. He stops, so to call the direwolf back when he decides not to, attracted by a powerful look whose owner for him is not difficult to recognize. It belongs to Sansa.

Tall and regal, dressed in blue and hers fur, again Jon marvels how it is possible that the crown lies on his head instead of hers that is more deserving.

Ghost yelps, a lament that you can barely hear, and Jon quits to watch the Queen that Sansa is in his eyes to search traces of the girl lost in the South of King's Landing's Court, whose greatest ambition was to be as happy as the protagonists of hers favorite ballads. The girl who has ceased believing in love and devotion and has been forced to discover on hers skin the most sordid aspects of desire, to grow ahead of time, to become her own hero when she had accepted that no one would go to take her to safety by hers captors.

He notes the way her hands are clenched around the wooden ledge, her face carefully expressionless and falsely placid as she stares hungrily at every corner of the courtyard, those eyes of pale blue, whose beauty he knows to be ruthless and without mercy if necessary, darting restlessly with a glimmer that he cannot identify or recognize.

Jon looks around bewildered, for once without the memories of the past to bite him. Suddenly the awareness hits him with the same treacherous and unpredictable force of Olly’s stab. The obviousness of the discovery makes him ashamed and the desperate, Sansa's angry bitterness is twin of the one that is devouring him.

Ghost’s moans are duplicated, because if before was Sansa’s pain that the direwolf gave voice, now is the pain of both that darkly rumored in the court through his howls.

Sansa's lips are stretched in a thin line, she closes her eyes and Jon finds himself holding his breath in front of the vulnerable expression, authentic mournfulness and sorrow, that she is leaving leaked.

When Sansa reopens her eyes, there's a smile in the back of them that is sweet-and-sour and precious. Her gaze meets his easily, as if she had always known that he was there with her to conjure up the ghosts that chase in the courtyard, the ancient echo of laughter and loved voices of those who they have lost, the familiar and domestic tranquility that made Winterfell home.

In her gaze, Jon finds all this and more.  
He sees the shadows that plague her, shadows of what was and will never be, not as it used to be. He finds the guy who killed to become the man he is and the girl that others have deemed right to kill to make her the woman she is.

 _At least I have you_ , she seems to say with that smile hidden. _I lost them, but I have you._

Like an amends to the past, she is telling him she is grateful that, among all other, is really him to be with her.

The courtyard is a view less intolerable and is filled with Sansa’s laugh when Ghost begins to hunt down a crow. Jon soon joins her and no longer feels to be a gap, a second choice, crushed by the weight of a second life that he never wanted. The infinite possibilities of that life unfold before him and for once they don’t have the usual murky light to shade them, but the clear light of Sansa’s eyes laughing with him, loving.

 


End file.
